


Like Mother, Like Daughter

by sunkelles



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe- Canon Divergence, Character Study, Faceless! Arya, Familial Relationships, Gen, Lady Stoneheart! Catelyn, Loss of Identity, Mother-Daughter Relationship, written in 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 15:03:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6199630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunkelles/pseuds/sunkelles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lady Stoneheart is no more Catelyn Stark than she is Arya Stark, but they were mother and daughter once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Mother, Like Daughter

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this fic a million years ago (a solid year, at least) and i thought that i'd lost it! lo and behold, i found it in my deleted docs and i decided to touch it up and post it. i'm still pretty pleased with it. 
> 
> people don't focus on cat and arya enough to begin with, and when cat is ladystone heart and arya is faceless, it just adds an extra level of interesting to the dynamic.

A girl wears the face of a young fisher’s daughter as she travels across Westeros. Pimples dot her face and her dirty blonde hair falls just to her shoulders, as stiff as old straw. She does not care much for this face, but she does not care much for any of them. She hasn’t cared for anything in a long time.

 

This face’s name was Lucy Snow. She was a bastard girl from White Harbor who traveled to Braavos to seek her fortune. She did not find it, and instead sought out her sweet sweet relief in the House of Black and White. She ended up finding that, at least.

 

A girl sought the Brave Companions. A girl has found them.

 

“The lady wants to know what ya’ want,” the man demands. He’s clad in leather and a bit of rusty chain mail. She knows immediately that he’s lowborn.

“I want to help,” she says. The man laughs.

“I do,” she asserts, “my brother died at the Red Wedding. I want to avenge him.” Lucy Snow never had a brother. A girl lets out an angry little breath. She has let herself deviate from her script.

“How could you help?” the man asks.

“I can use a sword,” she says, and suddenly she is reminded of a different time, a different place. It reminds her of back when she had a name. She pushes the thought aside.

“Can you?” he asks, drawing his own. A girl has disarmed the man before he can even blink, and he looks to the floor in confusion. The other man laughs at him. 

“It looks like the girl has potential,” he says, “send her into the lady.” A girl follows the man through the muddy floors of the building, and into a small room at the end. A girl spots the woman she seeks immediately, and she draws a quick breath. She looks so much the same, yet so different at the same time. The rumors are true. Lady Stoneheart once was Catelyn Stark.

 

The corpse stares at her coldly from her spot at the desk. Lady Stoneheart is no more Catelyn Stark than she is Arya Stark, but they were mother and daughter once. It feels odd to stare at the face of her distorted past, the walking corpse of her childhood. The woman’s skin is white and bumpy as curdled milk, and the constant scab on her neck looks even redder against her pale skin tone.

 

Once, a girl (a wolf, really) held this corpse in her mouth. Once, Catelyn Stark rocked a girl to sleep and sang her lullabies from the South. But that was back when a girl had a name, back before a cold space appeared where her heart ought to be. That was before any of the Starks had died, back when Arya Stark had been a girl with hopes and dreams, a brother and a sword. Back when she had a been a girl with a soul and a face of her own.  
  
There are no Starks left to cry for them now.

 

A girl really ought to kill her. That was the job she was given. She doesn’t know what’s stopping her. There are so many ways to do it, and the woman has already died once. She can’t be that hard to kill.

But instead a girl looks into her cold, blue eyes and sees herself reflected. She sees a little girl running around in puddles after the rain, chasing while she clutches a clump of mud in her hand. She sees an older brother ruffling her hair, and calling her “little sister”. She hears her mother’s voice chiding her, but affectionately calling her “little wildling”. She was so many things, before she became no one.

Lady Stoneheart presses her hand to her broken throat.

“She’ll do,” She says, her voice like a the wail of a dying animal. Stoneheart nods to her man, and he leads a girl out. A girl does not even think of killing Lady Stoneheart that night.

  
  


A girl finds a battle the next day. Lady Stoneheart watches as her men kill Boltons, and as a girl shoves her own sword through many of their hearts.

 

She should not take what belongs to the God, but he has taken so much that belongs to her. She decides to repay the favor.

 

They cut down Boltons, hang Freys, and poison Lannisters. It makes her feel alive, and she can see something glimmer in the corpse’s dead eyes. Satisfaction, passion, _schadenfreude:_ they all light like a wildfire in the woman’s river blue eyes. A girl does not do her duty that night.

  
  


A girl does not do her duty for weeks, and she starts to feel comfortable around the men of the Brave Companions. She remembers being younger, when she could make friends with anyone. It feels familiar, _comfortable._ A girl must not allow herself to become complacent.

  


She falls asleep and dreams a wolf dream, an _Arya_ dream. She finds Stoneheart that night, while in the in the skin of her wolf, and she snuggles against the walking corpse. The corpse pets her muzzle, and _Arya_ awakes with a scream.

 

She sneaks into Stoneheart’s chambers that night, and finds her wolf snuggled up against her. The woman is not asleep. She looks blankly at a girl- at _Arya._

“You aren’t my mother,” she says. She doesn’t know if she’s telling the woman or herself. She looks at the woman’s dead eyes, and sees no hint of remembrance in them. She wishes that she had the same gift of ignorance.

She has nothing. No house of Black and White, no family, nothing. The only thing that she has is bitter, painful memories. Even being unmade could not erase that. The woman stands up, anger the only emotion in her eyes. She can sympathize with that.

She is still a girl, though, and a girl fulfills her duty. She runs a sword through the corpse’s lifeless heart, and the once-dead woman falls to the floor, dead as any mortal. She just had to die twice. 

The sword finds its sheath in her heart, and a girl does not retrieve it. It doesn’t fill the emptiness inside of her. A girl doubts that anything ever will.

 

 _Arya,_ she thinks softly, _my name is Arya. And her name was Catelyn._ The men of the Brotherhood descend upon her, and she doesn’t bother to fight them off. She doesn’t have any reason to fight back.

  
She lets them kill her, and she joins all of her family in the grave. She wonders idly how many of them she will meet again in hell.


End file.
